Several University of Massachusetts students in Amherst made ill by tainted pot brownies

AMHERST — Brownies containing marijuana and laced with a second illegal substance sickened several University of Massachusetts students who consumed them.

UMass police and Amherst Fire Department paramedics responded Thursday night and early Friday morning to calls from students who became ill after eating the pot brownies.

“At a minimum the brownies contained marijuana,” UMass Deputy Police Chief Patrick Archbald said Monday. “We’re holding out judgment on what else was in them.”

Archbald said the brownies are being sent to a state drug lab for testing, though getting results about the exact substance could take several weeks.

All of those who called for medical assistance were either treated by ambulance crews or brought to Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, and returned back to their dormitory rooms later in the evening, Archbald said.

I don't understand how you can say in one paragraph that these brownies were laced with a second substance, and in the next, quote the police as saying that there may only be marijuana in them. If it's possible that there is only one, class D substance in the brownies... why would you falsely claim that there is a second substance? I'm very unimpressed by the lack of professionalism in this article. Hopefully the other staff writers are a little less biased when writing their articles.

Annonymous wrote:

12/06/2012

I completely agree. It does not make sense to say in the title and first paragraph that these brownies were tainted, but not have any evidence of such whatsoever. The article even goes onto say that they very well may have just contained marijuana. Also, if Merzbach did any research on the subject simply through google he would have found that reaching an such an extreme high and vomiting from eating baked goods containing marijuana is not all that uncommon, particularly if the consumer has low tolerance to marijuana (because of not smoking pot often prior to the consumption).